The administration’s puppets engage in Obama’s familiar pattern of lies when trying to avoid the smoking gun Benghazi email

This post is about the administration’s new tactic to get out from under the painful weight of the Ben Rhodes Benghazi email which establishes pretty definitively that the administration immediately began a cover-up after Ambassador Christopher Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, and Tyrone S. Woods were murdered. But before I get to the administration’s new tactic, let me quote at some length from a May 2008 post I wrote about Obama’s unique approach to lies, which I think of as the “affirmative defense style of lying.”

Obama is also a fairly compulsive liar, something that highlights myriad other problems. That is, whenever he’s caught in a problematic situation (ah, those friends of his), rather than making a clean breast of it, or a good defense, he instead engages in a perfect storm of ever-spiraling affirmative defenses, with the common denominator always being that it’s everyone’s fault but Obamas.

For those who are not lawyers, let me explain what affirmative defenses are. A complaint contains allegations that the defendant committed myriad acts of wrongdoing. In response, the defendant does two things. First, he denies everything except his own name, and he’d deny that too, if he could. Next, he issues affirmative defenses, which concede the truth of the accusations, but deny that they have any legal or practical meaning.

As an example of how this plays out, imagine a complaint alleging that I smashed my car into a fence, destroying it. I’d start by saying, “No, I didn’t.” Then I’d begin the affirmative defenses: (1) “Okay, I did bring my car into contact with the fence, but I didn’t actually hurt the fence.” (2) “Okay, I hurt the fence, but I didn’t hurt it badly enough to entitle its owner to any damages.” (3) “Okay, I destroyed the fence, but it was falling down already, so it’s really the owner’s fault, so he gets no damages.” And on and on, in a reductio ad absurdum stream of admissions and excuses.

These affirmative defense patterns have shown up with respect to some of Obama’s nastiest little pieces of personal history. When Jeremiah Wright’s sermons first surfaced, Obama denied knowing anything about them. When that denial failed, he claimed that he only had one or two exposures to this deranged level of hatred, so he didn’t make much of it. When that denial failed, he conceded that he’d heard this stuff often over the years, but wasn’t concerned about it, because he knew his pastor was a good man. (Which makes Obama either complicit in the statements or a fool.) Indeed, he even made a much-heralded speech about what a good man his pastor is. He then promised that he’d never abandon his beloved pastor. But when his pastor became dead weight, Obama dropped him so hard you could hear the thud.

The same pattern appeared when word got out about Obama’s connection with two self-admitted, unrepentant, America-hating terrorists. (That would be William Ayer and Bernadine Dohrn, for anyone out of the loop here.) When caught, Obama again engaged in a perfect storm of affirmative defenses. (1) I don’t know them. [A lie.] (2) Okay, I know them, but not well. [A lie.] (3) Okay, I know them well, but we’re just good friends, not political fellow travelers. [A lie.] (4) Okay, we’re more than just good friends, because we served on a Leftist board and I sought political advice from him. And on and on. With every lie, Obama concedes, and then comes forward with a new lie.

The same pattern emerges with Rezko, with Obama freely ranging from “I didn’t know him,” to “I never took favors from him,” to “I didn’t take big favors from him,” to “I took a big favor from him, but I didn’t know it was a big favor.” It just goes ad nauseum, as if Obama is a machine, programmed to spew forth this endless flow of denial and concession. The guy is pathological in his inability to admit wrongdoing and his ability to prevaricate.

[snip]

The question then becomes whether American voters will be happy with the constant barrage of Obama lies, and will be willing to travel Obama’s incremental pathways to unpleasant truths, or if they’re at last going to rebel and say “Who and what are you?” And if they finally get the truth, and it’s pretty sure to be ugly will it matter?

I’d like to think that the truth will matter, just as I’d like to think that, for many Americans, the mere fact that he lied so compulsively will matter too. After all, that is one of the reasons they’ve grown to hate Hillary. My dream is that, no matter how perfectly polished and highly functional the Obama political machine is, the fact that Obama is still the core of that machine will be, in and of itself, an insurmountable problem for him.

In sum, Obama tells a whopper of a lie, and then backs off of it incrementally, always preserving some little space of credibility where his lie really doesn’t, or shouldn’t, matter.

With that in mind, please enjoy Ace’s summary about the way in which the White House’s Pravda-MSM press is trying to spin that smoking gun Benghazi email today:

We saw this script change in the case of Bill Clinton, after the revelation of the Blue Dress.

We saw this script change much more recently in the case of Obama’s “If you like your insurance, you can keep your insurance lie,” when the script flipped from “You’re stupid and crazy to doubt Obama” to “Of course you can’t keep your insurance, that’s at the heart of the program’s cost-control measures; you’re stupid and crazy to have not realized this sooner!”

“What about the cover-up for the White House?” Scarborough interjected. “I’ve got everybody here apologizing for the White House. What about a cover-up, Donnie?”
“Why are you jumping to political strategy?” he continued. “So, tell me, what’s the politics of the White House lying about something that we all know they’re lying about?”

“You see the White House spokesperson lying on national television. You see an ABC Newsperson shocked that he’s lying and treating the press corps like they’re stupid. He says it’s not about Benghazi. Republicans and conservatives have been called fools for a year now for saying this happened. They don’t release it with the original the documents. They finally, reluctantly are forced to release it. Then you have the White House lying about it, saying it’s not about Benghazi, and you’re only reaction is, ‘Hey, Republicans better not overreact to the cover-up?’”

“We, as voters, understand both Republicans and Democrats are political animals and are going to manage a crisis to their favor,” Deutsch contested before he was interrupted.

So Scarborough says “we all know they’re lying,” and Deutsch finally — finally — does not dispute that, but instead chooses to recharacterize the acts of serial lying and cover-up as just some understandable political-animal crisis management.

For eighteen months the line from Obama — and therefore the line from the White House’s communications shops at ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN — has been that Obama was not a “political animal,” and certainly not on a matter of national security.

Now that the Blue Dress Proof of the emails are released, the defense changes to “Of course, this is all obvious, how stupid are you are for dwelling on obvious things.”

Please remember: Malignant narcissists never lie. Whatever they need to say at a given moment is the truth at that given moment.

Please remember also that a greater is probably never in greater danger than when both the government and the media are either narcissistic or have embraced narcissistic tactics as standard operating procedure.

So, for many reasons — to avenge our dead, to strengthen our national security, and to purge our government of sociopaths — in answer to Hillary’s timeless question about what difference this all makes, let me just say that it makes a Hell of a lot of difference.